Building a startup around conversations and communities

Five years ago, Kiran Jonnalagadda and I started to build HasGeek with the belief that there is need for conversations and communities around more and more focussed technology topics. We were clear that we wanted build technology communities and drill focus in every conference we'd launch under the HasGeek banner.

We were also determined to build the conferences and business in line with the following principles:

Content is always independent of sales. In other words, sponsors are not entitled to speak by virtue sponsoring at the conference.

Individuals are invited to propose a talk. No one is "invited" to "speak" (neither is proposing a guarantee to speak). All proposers have to go through rigorous scrutiny in order to make it on the stage.

Speakers have to speak about open source technology and ensure there is a concrete takeaway for the audience in terms of insight or practice.

Finally, participants are the primary customers. Sponsors are secondary. Consequently, participants' privacy is key for the conference's goodwill. Their data will not be shared without their permission.

Five years down and we have been agile and slow in various aspects of organizing conferences and building our business.

In this talk, we will share what it takes to build a startup in an agile and expedient manner around assets such as goodwill, trust and networks. Goodwill, trust and networks are critical for any startup's success. The key takeaway for the audience is to identify their strategies and practices for building these assets and build a business or community or both in an agile manner.

Outline/structure of the Session

xxx

Learning Outcome

In this talk, we will share what it takes to build a startup in an agile and expedient manner around assets such as goodwill, trust and networks. Goodwill, trust and networks are critical for any startup's success. The key takeaway for the audience is to identify their strategies and practices for building these assets and build a business or community or both in an agile manner.

Tathagat Varma - Minimum Viable Coaching: an experience report

schedule 2 years ago

20 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

In May 2015, I got involved in coaching a products organization in improving their agile practices. This was a unique coaching experience for me because of some interesting experiments that I did:

I focused on coaching and literally zero consulting.

My coaching stance was only limited to showing them the way, initially training them on the essence of agility, and later on to simply shine light on areas that needed their attention, and if needed, share ideas from the industry.

I spent just 1day every month with the teams to only focus on my coaching sessions, and a few hours during that time to review the progress.

The teams and the leadership would decide on what they wanted to do, and how much they wanted to change.

In ~6 months that I coached them, I found that the team has matured to a very high level of self-organization. They changed their process, their key roles and responsibilities, and self-organized into a very high-performing teams (which was corroborated not just from the high-energy levels of their teams but also the project metrics).

I call this model Minimum Viable Coaching, and it was helpful in demonstrating how a coaching could be made extremely effective if there is a client who is willing to trust its team in their ability to self-change, with minimal guidance (more of direction than really support) from an external coach. It also requires a coach to think in terms of minimum self-interests (read commercial interests) but focus on what will make the client successful in the long run.

In this experience report, I will share my approach and experiences, and offer some ideas on how the coaching can be elevated to a true coaching where the enterprise becomes self-organizing on their own.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Most new products and startups fail. The don't fail because the idea is fundamentally bad, or their talent isn't good enough, or they don't have enough funds or resources, but because of essentially prematurely scaling - i.e., without validating the hypothesis adequately, building a cost structure that is not sustainable over long run.

Customer Development model is the systematic way to discover and validate customers and build a company. Applying the principles of Lean Startups, one can go about validating the business model canvas before running out of money. However, when it comes to value proposition design, there is often a serious misalignment between what customers really want and how we create value for them.

In this workshop, we will learn how to use Value Proposition Canvas to sketch out and understand those relations better, and make more intelligent hypotheses, that hopefully lead to more successful products and services.